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An anonymous reader writes "Statewatch published a document revealing that Gilles de Kerchove, the EU counter terrorism coordinator, is advising the EU:

... to explore rules obliging internet and telecommunications companies operating in the EU to provide under certain conditions as set out in the relevant national laws and in full compliance with fundamental rights access of the relevant national authorities to communications (i.e. share encryption keys).

Lasrick (2629253) writes "Founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet. The decision to move (or to leave in place) the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock is made every year by the Bulletin's Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 17 Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world's vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and new technologies emerging in other domains. Today, the Clock was moved up 2 minutes; it is now 3 minutes to midnight. Here is the Board's statement on the move."Link to Original Source

Settlers of Catan, you've probably heard about, but that was just the game which enabled the genre; honored for it, but otherwise left behind as a deeply flawed example of what a truly strategic board game should be.

While I agree with the general premise, you manage to give Catan both too much and too little credit. It was definitely not the first game in the genre, though it was probably the one that brought it to mainstream attention. But I don't agree with your statement that it is deeply flawed. I still find the basic game a lot of fun to play.

Remember that Asimov was a professor of biochemistry. In the article, he investigates alternatives to the chemistry of life as we know it. He comes up with the following list:

[H]ere, then, is my list of life chemistries, spanning the temperature range from near red heat down to near absolute zero:
1. fluorosilicone in fluorosilicone
2. fluorocarbon in sulfur
3.*nucleic acid/protein (O) in water
4. nucleic acid/protein (N) in ammonia
5. lipid in methane
6. lipid in hydrogen
Of this half dozen, the third only is life-as-we-know-it. Lest you miss it, I've marked it with an asterisk.

When you read the article, you may want to skip the first bit and start from about the paragraph "Well, that's what I want to discuss."

Many people don't seem to realise that by editing Wikipedia anonymously, you're giving away your IP address for everyone to see. I'd expected a comment to that effect here but didn't, so I'll be the first to post it.

In that sense, editing with a registered account is much more anonymous. Only some Wikipedia staff members can look up your IP address, so edits from Capitol Hill using an account won't be picked up by this twitter bot. Also, those staff members (should) have to follow procedures before they can look up your IP.

This should be a lesson to all of us, since EDUCAUSE is definitely not
alone here: We all do regular, legitimate business in ways that is
sometimes indistinguishable from phishing, at least to regular users.
That needs to stop. Email marketers and analytics junkies will not like
to hear this, but we need to put an end to embedded email links that are
redirected through other systems. IMO, we should put an end to *all*
legitimate links in emails; instead have a business portal with all of
the links to surveys, training sites, etc., and have notification emails
for when new things appear on the portal. In addition, we could modify
our SSO sites so that they alert users when they need to take care of
something that we would normally use email for which to notify the user.
Once that's done, we can assure users that we will NEVER ask them to
click on a link in an email, just like we currently remind them that we
never ask them for passwords.

If that is "too hard" and/or the analytics stuff is "too valuable" then
we need to simply accept the risk that our users will get caught in
phishing attacks. The bad guys have figured out that it is very easy to
mimic our business practices, and they have gotten very good at doing
it. Unless we change those practices, they will find us to be easy
pickings.

The summary, and the Security Week article, write that "Users are more 21 times more likely to get hit with malware from online shopping sites than if they'd gone to a counterfeit software site".

Cisco's report says that "Online shopping sites are 21 times more likely to deliver malicious content than counterfeit software sites."

Those statements are not equivalent. Online shopping sites have many more visitors than counterfeit software sites, so they have more opportunity to deliver malware. The same goes for the factor of 27 for search engines.

Also, it's hard to check the factor of 182 for adult sites, since the report doesn't include that number, or in fact even the words "porn" or "adult".

All code in MariaDB is released under GPL, LPGL or BSD. MariaDB does not
have closed source modules like the one you can find in MySQL enterprise
edition. In fact, all the closed source features in MySQL 5.5 enterprise
edition are found in the MariaDB open source version.

MariaDB includes test cases for all fixed bugs. Oracle doesn't provide test
cases for new bugs fixed in MySQL 5.5.

In 1940, Robert A. Heinlein (writing under the pseudonym of Lyle Monroe) published a story called "Let There Be Light" where the firefly's bioluminosity whas studied leading to the development of "light panels", kinda-sorta predicting LEDs. It's a nice development that now the firefly is being studied to improve those LEDs. Though the mechanism is totally different of course.